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Many factors contribute to the vitality of an individual faculty member, a department, and an entire academic organization. Some of the relationships among these factors are well understood, but many questions remain unanswered. The Joint Task Force on Faculty Workforce examined the literature on faculty workforce issues, including the work of previous task forces charged by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). We identified and focused on 4 unique but interrelated concepts: organizational culture/climate, role of the department chair, faculty recruitment and retention, and mentoring. Among all 4 resides the need to consider issues of intergenerational, intercultural, and gender dynamics. This paper reports the findings of the task force and proffers specific recommendations to AACP and to colleges and schools of pharmacy.

Objective. To identify pharmacy faculty members' perceptions of psychological contract breaches that can be used to guide improvements in faculty recruitment, retention, and development. Methods. A list of psychological contract breaches was developed using a Delphi procedure involving a panel of experts assembled through purposive sampling. The Delphi consisted of 4 rounds, the first of which elicited examples of psychological contract breaches in an open-ended format. The ensuing 3 rounds consisting of a survey and anonymous feedback on aggregated group responses. Results. Usable responses were obtained from 11 of 12 faculty members who completed the Delphi procedure. The final list of psychological contract breaches included 27 items, after modifications based on participant feedback in subsequent rounds. Conclusion. The psychological contract breach items generated in this study provide guidance for colleges and schools of pharmacy regarding important aspects of faculty recruitment, retention, and development.

During the past couple of decades have been a host of studies on pharmacist job satisfaction and related quality of work life issues. The interest in this phenomenon is not surprising, given the stake in the profession that these pharmacy researchers have, as many are pharmacists themselves. Moreover, job satisfaction has implications for employee commitment and turnover-factors important in maintaining the labor supply of pharmacists to provide medication therapy management services.1 Another interest in pharmacist job satisfaction might be pharmacy educators' desire to provide a realistic preview to students of a career that hopefully will one day bring them professional contentment and fulfillment. As such, Payakachat and colleagues address several important issues in their study of satisfaction among pharmacist preceptors in a recent issue of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education (http://www.ajpe.org/doi/full/10.5688/ajpe758153). 2The results of satisfaction studies of pharmacists have largely produced a body of equivocal results; that is, there have been considerable inconsistencies in the findings. Payakachat and colleagues allude to this in their discussion of the study results. They point out discrepancies among their findings and the findings of other researchers in regard to the effect of work setting and practitioner demographics.3-6 They also correctly assert that these equivocal results are in part a function of varied sampling strategies and study designs. These seemingly disparate results also may be a function of the instrumentation used to measure satisfaction and even the statistical strategies employed to analyze the data. Some strengths of Payakachat and colleagues' approach include a validated and reliable measure of job satisfaction and their use of an analysis of covariance model to account for potential confounders such as stress and workload, 2 of many factors that could skew the results.

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